


Alive in your blood now

by lotesse



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Barrayaran Customs, Coming of Age, Family, Feminist Themes, Gen, Inheritance, Reproductive Rights, Sexual Equality, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 22:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the roll call comes to “Vorkosigan,” Helen Natalia smiles, throws back her head, and casts her vote.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alive in your blood now

_The peace of great silhouettes be for you_  
_Shadow dancers alive in your blood now,_  
_Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.”_

-Carl Sandburg

 

When Helen Natalia Vorkosigan is very, very small, everyone calls her “Hellion." Her Da says that she was born with an inclination to trouble and mayhem. But as soon as she learns the words to say it - which happens when she's three - she tells them that her name is Helen Natalia, and makes it clear that she wants to be called by it, all of it, the whole long thing. 

“Isn't it a bit of a mouthful? Especially for such a little snip of a girl as you?” Uncle Ivan says, catching her up and throwing her into the air. He catches her in his strong, safe arms, and Tantine Tej laughs – but Da gets a funny look on his face, like he's remembering something and doesn't much like it. It's a bit as if he's bitten into a lemon. He glances sidelong at Mama, Helen Natalia sees him, and she also sees trouble and sorrow and an inexplicable guilt in his eyes.

“Not at all,” her Da says to Uncle Ivan. “Helen Natalia has every right to expect us to take the time to say her full name, if that's what she wants.” 

Three weeks later, she confides to her Mama that it's all right for them to call her “Hellion” some of the time, when it's like the way Da calls Mama “Milady” when he wants her to know without being told it how very much he loves her. But she stays Helen Natalia for the rest of her life, long elegant uncompromising syllables surrounding her like a glittering cloak, like a carapace, like a suit of shielding armor.

*

In one of the oldest whole memories Helen Natalia has, she's lying curled up in her little bed – maybe eight years old, maybe seven – and beneath the tiny glittering model of her homeworld that usually dangles above her sleep a little Sergyar is spinning, the two planets looped together by fine silver chains. Gran'dame always brings it with her when she visits, even though she lives on Beta Colony now. But before that, she used to be the Vicereine of Sergyar, and she'd told Helen Natalia once about how she'd met Gran'da Aral for the very first time there, who's dead but who Sasha's named for. They'd fought off poisonous bubble creatures and then got married. Sasha says he can remember Gran'da Aral, but Helen Natalia doesn't believe him. She knows she can't, and her memory is better than Sasha's anyway.

It's very late at night, even though light still comes slanting up from downstairs, where Helen Natalia can hear the sounds of the grownups' party. She'd been for a while; it had been fun, but then she'd got tired of it and asked to go up to bed. Helen Natalia loves being in bed, the quiet and the darkness and the privacy of her own mind; her Da always laughs when she asks to go to bed early, but it's the kind of laughing he does when he loves her very much, so she doesn't mind. She's lying very still, very quiet, and when the door opens she doesn't move or make any sound.

More light spills into the room, and from the doorway Helen Natalia hears Mama saying, “... women's liberation, Cordelia?” Mama sounds mostly light and happy, but there's something serious lurking in the corner of her tone, and Helen Natalia knows when she hears it that this is something to pay attention to.

“Don't pretend that Barrayar doesn't need it, desperately so. I know you know otherwise.”

Mama sighs, and when she speaks again the lightness and happiness have gone away, swallowed by the serious thing. “Yes. But that was my own fault as much as anyone's – I let it happen, no one forced me.”

Gran'dame tsks her tongue. “There are more ways to influence children than by force, Ekaterin. No one prepared you, either, did they?”

Mama's quiet for a long moment, and Helen Natalia listens to the soft sounds of her footfalls as she crosses the room, the sussuration of Mama's breath as she leans down over Helen Natalia's bed. She can feel the weight of Mama's eyes on her, gentle and heavy, and she takes care not to look up or otherwise betray her wakefulness. At last, Mama says, “Did they prepare you? On Beta?”

Now it's Gran'dame's turn to be quiet. She answers, “They certainly tried. They prepared me for sex, and work, and cooperation. But I'll admit that they didn't prepare me for love, or the attendant self-sacrificial urges, and that that caused me a fair amount of grief. No, Beta's better, but they still haven't entirely solved the problem of sexual dimorphism. Love is not an egalitarian force, at the base of it, and that unfits it for the Betan system.”

“Things are so much better than they used to be, even when I was a girl,” Mama says. “Young women chose their lives much more carefully, and they're starting to have access to a real variety of choices. Look at women like Delia Galeni, or her sisters – look at Dono Vorrutyer, for that matter. And I can't think of the last time I heard anyone mention sending round a baba.”

“Choice isn't the issue, not really. A woman has still never held a district, voted in council, commanded a cruiser or even a cavalry troop. And without that, all the rest is just window dressing.”

Mama sighs again, and reaching down caresses Helen Natalia's loose hair, the soft palm of her hand curling around the curve of Helen Natalia's skull. It feels so good that Helen Natalia has to fight against an impulse to curl into the touch like one of Ma Kosti's kittens, but she makes herself stay still; she doesn't want Mama and Gran'dame to stop talking like this. She wants, instead, to hear what they have to say. But as Mama's hand continues its movement Helen Natalia feels sleepier and sleepier, wakefulness starting to slip away from her like a tide running out from a beach.

“The old problem of honor,” Mama says. “You're right, I'm afraid.”

When Gran'dame crosses the room, Helen Natalia notices, she's much quieter than Mama, the movement-sounds of her body almost unnoticeable. Gran'dame reaches down to take Mama's hand, and for a moment both of them are touching Helen Natalia, their clasped hands pressing against her cheek. She's already floating, spinning down a current of drowsiness, but she thinks she hears Gran'dame say, “Children are new chances.” And then maybe: “Aral would have liked it,” but she's too far under the dark surface of sleep to figure out what her brother has to do with it.

*

Throughout Helen Natalia's infancy and childhood, her Da sings her the same long song every night before bed: an old Barrayaran ballad, about the legendary hero Vorthalia the Bold and his adventures. Da sings it in a funny voice, a little bit like Dowager Countess Vortrifrani's, very round at the vowels and rich with trilling r's. When she lies awake in bed, afterward, by herself in the dark, she keeps imagining the dashing lord, loyal to the last; only sometimes Lord Vorthalia has a girl's face, and sometimes the face looks an awful lot like Helen Natalia's own.

When she's fifteen Helen Natalia looks up the text of the ballad on her comconsole and runs a replace command on it, regendering the pronouns. It messes up some of the rhymes so she tries rewriting her favorite bits in prose. When there's enough of it she shows it to her Da, for the lack of any better confidant – she hasn't told Sasha about the project at all, and Lillibet wouldn't have seen the point of it, because she doesn't like stories _or_ Time of Isolation stuff. Da coughs a bit when he gets to the scene where Lady Vorthalia rescues Emperor Xian Vorbarra from the tower in the thicket of thorns, which Helen Natalia has to admit reads as oddly romantic because of the way she's changed things around, but the only things he says out loud are helpful remarks about structure and general narrative pacing. She kisses his pain-lined cheek before she dances down the stairs.

When she's eighteen she puts the thing back into verse; she wants to try and catch what it means to her in words, her Da's story made her own, and prose is too flat and monologic to hold it all. She tries to imitate the sound and style of the Escobaran love poetry she's been reading, no rhymes but instead strange and delicious images strung together on the strings of verse lines, heavy and luminescent and sensual. She doesn't show the result of that experiment to anyone at all, even though she frequently re-opens the file to read it over herself.

*

Helen Natalia is fourteen the first time she falls in love. It's with Dmitri Vorgorov, who goes to her school, and everything about it is horrible. He's handsome and suave and never worries about anything at all as far as she can tell, and she's so eaten up with nerves that she freezes up whenever they're in the same room. Her mama says not to worry, if she really likes him he'll like her back. Armsman Roic offers to detain him after school for her, but she tells him no; even though she'd love to be able to come to Dmitri's rescue like a hero in a ballad, she's got enough sense to know that it probably wouldn't work out the way she wants it to.

She writes a poem about his eyebrows, comparing them to birds in flight. She doesn't show that one to her Da, either.

Aglaya Vorob'yev is in their class too, as small and quiet as Helen Natalia is brash and brilliant, and Helen Natalia's never really given her a second thought until she finds Dmitri pinning Aglaya down in the girls' washroom, Aglaya flinching back against the unforgiving concrete walls of her corner and Dmitri using the advantage of his height to bear down on her, disallowing escape. Aglaya's eyes are all red, and she's not making any sound at all. 

“... little prole bitch,” she hears Dmitri hissing, “you should be flattered that I even looked at you. Nothing better's going to come down the line for you, you're barely Vor at all, fat pinchmark cow, no reason to hold out.”

And then Helen Natalia's knuckles hurt from colliding with Dmitri's nose. She clutches her damaged hand with her undamaged one, breathing hard so as not to cry out. Dmitri is on his knees, blood pouring down over his hands, his collar, his shirt. She feels savagely pleased and utterly mortified at the same time. 

His face contorts in a pained snarl, and she thinks that there's really nothing so nice about it after all. His eyebrows are all right, but his eyes are hard and cold and small, and his mouth is nasty. 

Aglaya, still shaky, pulls away from the wall. She looks at Dmitri with something horrible in her eyes, and then she turns to Helen Natalia and that's worse because she looks – grateful – and then she shakes her head, dashes the tears from her eyes, and runs out of the washroom like Baba Yaga's on her tail. 

Helen Natalia doesn't get in trouble, because Dmitri doesn't want anyone to know that a girl broke his nose. He calls her a bitch, but no niece of Delia and Olivia and Tej was likely to flinch in the face of a fistfight, and Helen Natalia had got in more than enough hours of practice with Armsman Roic over the years to not worry overmuch about verbal threats. Dmitri sees it in her eyes, the knowledge that she can and will take him, and backs down like the whining cur he really is.

At first she wants to destroy her poem, rip it up or burn it, but in the end she simply puts it away. Somehow it feels important to keep a record of this lesson.

*

In secondary school, Helen Natalia likes ethics, writing, history, and algebra. She doesn't like life sciences, and when they vivisect a frog she stands out in the hall with Jayant Vorpatril and Berenice Vorrutyer and Crown Prince Gabriele, because even though she understands that sometimes science needs to take life to learn about life, it's not like their class of privileged Vor teens is going to be making any medical breakthroughs, which makes the frog's tormented death an ultimately useless act of cruelty, and she doesn't want to watch the poor thing twitching out its life on the cold steel dissecting table. 

Gabriele's real name is Serg, but no one calls him that, not ever. Not even in school records. Helen Natalia wonders why his parents bothered to give him a name that no one was ever supposed to use, but she doesn't ever ask about it.

*

Helen Natalia knows that she came out of a uterine replicator – that's how she and Sasha can have the same birthday without their being biological twins. And, rationally, she's aware that replicators are a relatively new thing on Barrayar, because she knows the story of her father's prenatal damage, knows that he was hurt when he was still in Gran'dame Cordelia's body. 

Nikki, her much-older half-brother, had been gestated in their Mama's body. She'd asked Mama once what it had felt like, to grow a baby inside her body, and Mama had said, “Strange. And uncomfortable.” 

Mama had said that replicators were best, because they were so safe, but also that if there hadn't been any around for her to use she would have had Helen Natalia and Sasha and Lillibet and Taurie, because a wanted baby was worth a certain amount of pain and risk. But Helen Natalia had never really thought about what an old-fashioned body-birth would look like, sound like, smell like. The summer that she's seventeen, she finds out.

June is abroad, full-throated and glorious, and the Dendarii Mountains are lush with the velvet green of summer maples. She goes up by lightflyer, newly thrilled by the rich Barrayaran ecology, camps and tours and visits. The Raina Csurik Primary School, nestled by a lake in sleepy Silvy Vale, is an obvious destination; Harra Csurik's been a friend to all the Vorkosigan children in their turn, and Helen Natalia finds something about the woman's patient tough-worn endurance both terrifying and oddly attractive. Harra, she thinks, is someone you can tell anything to, anything at all. 

The day's lessons are just ending, little girls and boys in homespun clothes and bare feet vibrating with released energy as they pour out into the sunshine. Harra brings Helen Natalia in, sits her down at a desk, and pours her a cup of tea, and Helen Natalia watches while she puts away her classroom, shutting down the SatNet console and quieting the hum of the electric projector.

A child comes banging back in through the hall, shattering the quiet peace of the afternoon. “Ma Csurik, Ma Csurik, you gotta come quick!”

Harra straightens from where she'd been sorting through a heap of styluses, and when she sees who the girl is she says, “Elzy? What's the matter, honey?”

The little girl starts to cry in the face of this adult kindness. “Ma said – Rosanah's been over to take in whortleberries, an' she fell down and made an awful noise, Ma Csurik, she sounded real bad, and there was wet all over her dress and Ma said it was the baby, and did you know where Ma Huber was to help w' th' birth?”

Harra is already putting away her things. She's halfway out the door, the distressed child in tow, when she turns back, remembering. “M'lady,” she says, “I'm going to have to – they taught us, in Hassadar, if they can't find the midwife they'll need me. Will you wait here? I'll send someone to bring you home to supper.”

Helen Natalia, with her usual curious interest in peering at secret things, says, “Could I come with you instead?” Harra nods, distracted, and Helen Natalia follows her out. 

The birth ends up being horrible, more bloody and scary and awful than any school biology lab. They go into a little low dark cottage, and Rosanah turns out to be a girl who doesn't look much older than Helen Natalia herself, lying on a low pallet with sweat-dark hair clinging to suffused face. 

The baby is breech, positioned foot-first in its mother's birth canal, and Rosanah sweats and strains for fruitless hours before the midwife can get there. Helen Natalia and little Elzy lurk by the door, waiting. Rosanah cries out and Elzy fists her little hand in Helen Natalia's skirt. She can't be Rosanah's daughter; Helen Natalia wonders if they might not be sisters.

Ma Huber makes Rosanah get up and walk, stumbling and panting, back and forth across the room. 

Helen Natalia, heating more water on an old camp-stove set up in one corner, asks Harra, “Is she – can you die from this?” Harra doesn't answer, but her lips go thin. Helen Natalia thinks, suddenly, that Harra's babies were also born from her body, even the little dead one that the school was named after. 

But somehow everything comes out right, and the little red-purple thing lies squalling on Rosanah's breast. Helen Natalia almost can't believe it; surely something with that much blood and pain attached should lead to an outcome less lovely than a new baby. 

Rosanah asks, voice husky with strain, if she can have the lady's blessing to name the babe in her honor. Helen Natalia, still shocked and a little scared, can only nod, tonguetied. Belike they'll call the child Nelly for short.

*

Helen Natalia does her first two years of college in Vorbarr Sultana, before finishing off her degree on Beta. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” Grantante Vorthys tells her, and she clutches the old Earth proverb to her heart like a lover. She writes her senior thesis on Barrayaran women as cultural and genetic gatekeepers and enjoys the work, a different kind of language-use than poetry but one that's just as meaningful.

She sleeps with two men, a woman, and three herms over the course of her time on Beta, and each time it's fun, but love isn't really relevant. For the time being, she honestly prefers it that way. If love comes – the kind of love her parents have, she won't settle for anything less – okay, but until that happens she's got plenty to do, and know, and feel.

*

Helen Natalia is twenty-three when Sasha comes home from University. He'd stayed on Beta to do a year's work of advanced xenobotany, and his vid notes to her are jubilant and engaged and excited, with none of the dark moodiness that had been so troubling in him during their teens. And she's happy for him, she really is. It's great that he's starting to find his calling, putting all those years of helping Mama interface the remnants of Barrayar's original ecology with the Earth imports the colonists had lost control of all those centuries ago to his profit. 

But while he's been learning about soil toxicity and photosynthesis variation, she's been living in Vorkosigan House. Each of the Vorkosigan children had, on turning thirteen, been granted their own spaces on the third floor of the massive old residence, which had formerly been inhabited by the old count and countess, before he'd died and she'd gone home. “It's a good system,” Da had said when he'd first proposed the move. “I took over the second floor from my Gran'da, after all. Keeps the pattern going.”

Helen Natalia's room is at a corner. She can see into the sheltered tranquility of her mother's garden through one window, and out toward the bustle of Vorbarr Sultana through the other. As a teenager she'd preferred the city view, but now she looks more and more often down into the Barrayaran garden, trying to lose her thoughts in following the organic shapes and movements of her mother's design. If she doesn't have to think, maybe she won't have to hurt.

Things are a mess. Taurie's dating this boy – a prole, although since that's not a significant factor for the family it only serves to confuse and muddy the issue – who Mama says isn't good for her. Out of Taurie's earshot Helen Natalia agrees, adding acerbically that he's not good enough _for_ her, either. But Taurie, who says she's in love, is digging her heels in about him, and Helen Natalia knows enough about her mother's history to realize that it's got to be like torture for the former Madame Vorsoisson. She wishes Mama had been more forthcoming about that whole thing; she tends towards reticence, and Helen Natalia only knows what she does because she's an inveterate snoop with a steel-trap memory. Taurie can't see the context, though, so she doesn't know how to avoid old bruises. The quarrels have been dreadful, Taurie yelling and stamping and slamming and Mama going cold and pale and miserable.

And then there's Da. He's not doing well, his small scarred abused body starting to crumble in the face of over fifty years of passionate whole-hearted service. He's been limping more and more heavily, no longer trying to leave his grav crutch at home, and more than once now Helen Natalia's surprised a horrible blue tinge at the edges of his mobile, expressive mouth after particularly intense moments of exertion or strain. 

She'd never been able to believe, as so many other children did, that her father was immortal. His death was written on his body, clear as a sentence. But the lesson is coming home now in ways she doesn't feel ready for, not yet. She tries to hide her outbursts of wild preemptory grief, the panic gnawing at the root of her heart. Mama doesn't need to carry Helen Natalia's fears on top of the ones that have got to already be weighing her down. 

She could never show Da her worry; it would upset and shame him, to feel himself a burden on her shoulders. But she starts finding reasons to ride out with him when he goes into the district, and when the Council of Counts convenes she takes up the habit of slipping into the visitor's balcony and taking careful, detailed notes. Sometimes, afterward, they go out for coffee, and then she lays all her stored-up questions in his lap like a vassal-offering. She learns the names of the various mountain communities, many of which she'd visited personally as a child; she pores over techno-development plats, remembering her shocked horror when she'd realized that Harra's friend hadn't had the choice to grow her babies in a replicator, hadn't had the choice to dictate the usage of her own womb. These are things, she thinks, that she needs to know, although even in the privacy of her own mind she doesn't articulate the reason. Not yet.

Sometimes, if they've been walking or riding for a long time, Da freezes up, joints and muscles awkwardly locking together, and when that happens she tries to help him conceal it and keep him from falling over at the same time, and she inevitably feels ill and clammy and miserable. 

Sasha gets home from the spaceport and, after a brief interval of exclamations and embraces, heads off for his own third-floor rooms. Helen Natalia, more privileged by her status as Sasha's almost-twin than even Mama and Da, goes with him, sitting by the window as Sasha flops down dramatically on his bed. His room is more sparsely furnished than hers, everything done in clean angles of white plascrete and accent color where hers is soft woodtones and lyrical-lined embellishment. “Whew, Hellion, that trip almost did me in,” he says. “In retrospect, I guess it's really a good thing I didn't try to transport those seedlings – they never would've made it.”

“No one ever said space travel was fun,” Helen Natalia answers.

“Not true – Nikki spent our entire childhood going on about how cool space was, how wormhole-jumping was the best thing ever. You remember how psyched he was when the University got that zero-g simulator? I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel or something.”

“Okay,” she grants. “No one but Nikki said it was fun. Since when do you listen to Nikki?”

He laughs, and then goes quiet. She says nothing, letting the silence spool out around them, waiting for him to be willing to tell her about it. But then he dodges, “How's everyone here? Business as usual? Tante Kareen sends her love.”

“That's nice,” Helen Natalia says, swallowing hard. “Things aren't so good, Sasha.” 

He sits up sharply. “Da?” She nods in affirmation, and he makes a small sound. “So – how bad?”

“Not that bad,” she hurries to reassure him. She decides not to tell him about Taurie – that situation isn't critical yet, just grinding and difficult. “It's just – he's just starting to wear down, I think, and we both know how good he is at accepting limitations, particularly his own.” 

She hadn't realized what a relief it would be to talk to someone openly about this; she'd spent hours letting her Mama talk about Taurie, but no one had spoken of Da's problems – in her hearing, at least. What went on in private on the second level of Vorkosigan House was a mystery even from her eternally-pricked-up ears. But she could tell Sasha all about it, even how afraid she was, even how hard it was to have to help the Da who had so often seemed a minor deity, how ashamed she felt whenever she saw through the mask of strength and power and size that he projected around himself to the pained, worn man, battered by fifty years of cultural war. 

After she's finished spilling her guts to him, Sasha rakes her with a searching look. “Are you okay?” he asks, and this time she shakes her head; no point hiding things, not from him. 

“We're going to have to do something,” she says. “It's the only way. No one could ever tell him to cut back, slow down, but he would do anything to teach an eager student. We're going to have to push the issue of succession a little, see if we can't get him to hand some of the work of running the district over to the heir.”

Sasha sighs heavily, lying sprawled out on his bed like a boneless invertebrate. “Which would be me, right?” 

He's silent again, and when he breaks it this time he tells her, “I was offered the chance of a berth on one of the five-year survey missions. I was thinking – I'd have to study for another two years first, but even so I'd get back before I was thirty, there would be plenty of time.”

“Sasha … that's … I'm sorry. The Betan Expeditionary Service?”

He nods. “Like Gran'dame, yeah. I couldn't make captain, obviously, but maybe the second science officer? Even if I was just in the labs, it would be – to encounter totally new ecologies, just imagine, plants and organic structures that no one had ever even thought of. There was a chapter in one of my books last semester about Gran'dame's work on Sergyar, the discovery of hexagonal life, whole systems built on base six. That's – I want that, Helen Natalia. I'd do anything for that.”

He means it; she can hear it in his voice. “Anything?” she asks. “Abandon Da? Abandon the district?”

Sasha cuts his eyes sideways at her. “Hellion, I – couldn't you – ”

He can't finish the sentence, but she knows what he's thinking. It's the thing she's been trying herself not to acknowledge for the last several months.

It's her turn to sigh. She crosses the room to stand by the window, looking down at the view that was wholly engulfed by garden, its reds and browns restful to the eye. “You see it too, then,” she says. “At least I'm not the only one.”

“You'd be better at it than I would,” he says, putting the thought into concrete words, and she wants to quail away from them but she knows she can't, and keep her honor. And she will not be forsworn.

“I won't do it the old way,” she says, throwing her shoulders back; her hair is loose, and she can feel the weight of it hanging down her back like aerial roots. “I won't mind the district while you govern in name, Sasha. I've heard too many horror stories from Uncle Dono about the years when he did that, before he inherited from his brother. It would be too easy for something to go wrong. If the legal Count Vorkosigan were however many jumps away, unreachable, when he was needed – we can't risk that. I couldn't bear that.”

Sasha wails, “But I can't – the Betan Expeditionary Service!” and then grumbles, “And you really would be better at it.”

“I know,” she says. “So we're going to have to petition the council to alter the Vorkosigan succession. We're going to have to get me declared Da's heir.”

Sasha flops back against his bed, breath rushing out of his lungs with an audible whoosh. “A woman's never ...”

“Yeah. I'll have to be the first, I guess.”

He rolls over, stands up, comes over to stand at the window beside her, and for a moment they just stand there looking down: the eldest children of House Vorkosigan, protected by its walls but burdened by its weight. “It'll never work if I don't have your support, Sasha,” she says at last. “If we co-petition, well, that's never been tried before as far as I know. And if Da backs us – there would be no counter-argument left except sex discrimination, and I think we could maybe beat it.”

“You'd be heir then, Hellion,” he says, looking down at her from his extra inch of height. She thinks, fleetingly, that he wasn't this tall before he left for Beta. “Are you ready for that?”

“No,” she answers honestly, “but I think I could be.”

*

Lady Helen Natalia Vorkosigan sweeps in to the council session, assuming her appointed place with a projected air of careless indifference. She's trying desperately to move with grace, to not stumble or trip or rush or outwardly show her awkwardness. She's been her father's heir for six years now, and that mantle has begun to grow warm and comfortable around her shoulders. She's ridden abroad through the district as her count's voice, given judgement and command with his breath. Now her Da thinks – and she agrees – that there's something _right_ about her casting this vote as his deputy, though until this moment he's always handled the nasty political stuff. Now she can be the messenger and the message, all in one.

She doesn't trip or stumble as she makes her way to the Vorkosigan seat; her intense focus actually helps her, letting the sound of whispers and the weight of stares roll off of her without serious impact. She glances up to the visitor's balcony, where her father and mother are sitting in the spot that was so often hers; she and her Da have switched places. Da is fierce, intent, nervy, a small nuclear reactor barely contained by the high railing. Mama's face is calm and smooth, and she's stroking her husband's hand with a soothing repetitive motion. Helen Natalia wonders if Mama is really so confident, or if she's just projecting to quiet Da's nerves. 

She takes her seats with a swirl of skirts and a whisper of silk. She feels something like a cross between Cendrillon at the ball and Joan of Arc in her full plate armor, simultaneously beautified and weaponized. When she'd first won the heirship she'd half-jokingly suggested getting Sasha's house dress uniform re-tailored, but her Da had shaken his head with a genuine look of horror on his face, and she'd let the notion drop. In the end Lady Alys had mixed the sartorial attributes of a cadet's house uniform with traditional Barrayaran women's semi-formal dress, putting her into a long, full, brown skirt and a brown-and-silver bolero. Helen Natalia's mother had pinned her hair up for her that morning, winding it in complicated braids and whorls no one could possibly construct on her own unless they'd had the luck to be born a quaddie.

She hadn't realized the hall would feel so – big – from down on the floor. It wasn't like this at all from her usual spot in the high balcony. Count Vorrutyer winks at her, and she gives him a shaky smile in return. Helen Natalia feels her heart pounding against her ribcage, the living energy of her body coiling towards its work; she half-imagines that she can feel currents of political and social power thrumming through the wooden floor, worn burnished-smooth with age and the accumulated polish of history.

It's not an endangered vote for the Progressive Party, but neither is it a particularly ironclad one. The atmosphere on the floor is one of subtle electricity, all present aware that something important was going to happen today, one way or the other. The opening arguments are made: girls should be permitted to serve in the Barrayaran military, because proles could, and because women are being hired in more and more active security roles anyway and shouldn't they be merged into the chain of command – not “girls should be permitted to serve because that's right and just”; this wasn't Beta, after all. The counterarguments were nothing new, the same reactionary anxiety and blind stubbornness that Helen Natalia had grown very used to, over her months and years in the gallery above.

The vote begins, “yea”s and “nay”s falling like coins and petals to the stone floor. As the roll call rushes down on her through the alphabet Helen Natalia thinks of Tita Elena with her short hair and soldier's stance, of Rosanah and baby Nelly tucked away in Silvy Vale, of Taurie with her unsuitable boyfriend and Lady Alys with her iron control. She thinks of Mama smiling in the Yellow Parlor with flowers in her hair, Da looking at her like she'd hung the stars. 

When the roll call comes to “Vorkosigan,” Helen Natalia smiles, throws back her head, and casts her vote.

**Author's Note:**

> Women have only had the right to vote in Greece since 1952, in the U.S. since 1920, in 1918 in the U.K., and in 1917 in Russia. [Here's a link to a table of other international women's suffrage dates.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage#Table_of_international_women.27s_suffrage)
> 
> Ladies, vote early and often!


End file.
